In chess, before one competitor bests the other, they must navigate the endgame --- a particularly challenging stage in which only a few pieces are left on the board and, therefore, only a few strategic moves remain.

In the endgame, every move is a life-or-death decision. Therefore, every choice is epic and not to be made hastily or passionately.

Lately, it feels as though we as a people are in an endgame --- whether in international relations, domestic economics or homegrown political divides. Few moves remain and each of them feels perilous and nearly final.

Two recent films helped shed light on the precariousness of our age, of this endgame and how we might navigate our way through it --- even, perhaps, to a new game on the other side.

Both films are set in Africa --- one a 53-minute documentary and the other a feature-length dramatic film. "As We Forgive," the documentary, winner of a 2008 Student Academy Award, has just been released on DVD. (See www.asweforgivemovie.com for more information.)

The feature film, "Endgame," aired on PBS's Masterpiece Theater in late October and is now available for viewing --- free of charge --- on the PBS Web site.

"As We Forgive" is set in Rwanda where, in 2004, more than 50,000 convicted murderers who were responsible for nearly 1 million deaths during a 100-day genocide in 1994 were released back into their communities due to overcrowding in Rwandan prisons.

The prisoners, most of the ethnic Hutus who had turned on their Tutsi neighbors and co-worshippers in churches, often hacking them to death with machetes and clubs studded with nails, had confessed their crimes and assumed responsibility for their actions.

Their reintroduction to the very communities where they had brutally murdered mothers, fathers and entire families caused tremendous anxiety both for their surviving victims and for the former prisoners themselves.

In a bold move, politically and spiritually, the Rwandan government, taking a page from post-Apartheid South Africa's "truth and reconciliation" movement, urged the ex-prisoners to seek out their victims and ask forgiveness. "As We Forgive" follows the stories of several of these would-be reconciliations.

Masterpiece Theater's "Endgame," tells the true story of the behind-the-scenes negotiations at a manor house in the English countryside between leaders of the African National Congress and prominent Afrikaners in the 1980s that led to Nelson Mandela's release from prison after 27 years and the eventual end of South African apartheid.

It was a story about which I knew very little before watching this magnificent film earlier this fall. Essentially, Michael Young, head of communications for Consolidated Gold Fields, a British mining company with significant assets in South Africa, realized that continued racial tensions in the country were bad for business (not to mention morally reprehensible).

At the behest of Oliver Tambo, head of the African National Congress, Young set about organizing clandestine and risky meetings between Thabo Mbeki, Tambo's right-hand man and the public information officer for the ANC, and influential Afrikaners, including Willem Petrus "Willie" Esterhuyse a prominent university professor. The hope was that these face-to-face meetings by sworn enemies might lead to some sort of a break in the racial impasse.

The film follows the struggles of Esterhuyse and Mbeki --- each with their own personal woundedness and baggage from the decades-long racial warring in South Africa --- to overcome their own pain to build a bridge that would rescue their society.

It's one of the more powerful films I've ever seen. At one point, a member of South African President P.W. Botha's administration (Botha was adamantly against the end of apartheid) confronts Esterhuyse and mocks the negotiations to find common ground. Talk is cheap, the pro-apartheid wonk tells the professor. "Talk is all we have," Esterhuyse counters.

In the end, the talking changes everything. In what was for me the most moving part of the film, just before the credits roll, text appears on the screen updating the viewer about the fate of Young, Mbeki, Esterhuyse and other key players.

One of the updates explains that during negotiations in Northern Ireland to bring about a lasting peace and an end to the sectarian Troubles, negotiators reached out to the members of the "endgame" negotiations in South Africa for advice on how to proceed. And then, most recently, negotiators in Israel and Palestine, working to bring peace to the Holy Land, have sought advice from their Northern Irish counterparts.

The kind of bridges that talk created in South Africa are now being replicated in other war-torn parts of the world.

Forgiveness is the most radical of activities.

Whether we're forgiving or accepting forgiveness, confessing or hearing the confession, allowing forgiveness to walk through the door and take a seat can change everything --- even when it seems there are no viable options left.

Because, as South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu reminds us, "Without forgiveness, there is no future."

Cathleen Falsani is the author of "Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace" and the new book, "The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers."